Like every other state, Pennsylvania spent many tens of millions (or more) to develop a new teacher evaluation system. Guess what?
Teachers got their highest ratings ever!
“In the first year of many school districts using a new statewide teacher evaluation system, a greater portion of teachers was rated satisfactory than under the old system.
“In figures released by the state Department of Education, 98.2 percent of all teachers were rated as satisfactory in 2013-14 — the highest percentage in five years — despite a new system that some thought would increase the number of unsatisfactory ratings.”
“In the four prior years, 97.7 percent of teachers were rated satisfactory in all but 2009-10, when 96.8 percent were. These figures count teachers in school districts, career and technical centers, intermediate units and charter schools.”
Pennsylvania is fortunate to have so many good teachers!
Whom shall we blame now?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The answer is clear.
You blame the new rating system for not setting the bar high enough, call in the economists from Brookings, or McKinsey Co., or USDE staff and just raise the bar. And also get some economists to tell what a waste it is to have so many satisfactory ratings and not enough firings with a new version of the shaming book: Weisberg, D., Sexton, S., Mulhern, J., & Keeling, D. (2009). The widget effect: Our national failure to acknowledge and act on differences in teacher effectiveness. Brooklyn, NY: The New Teacher Project.
Do this over and over again ad infinitum.
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In other words, that’s what happens when the rheephormsters “soft bigotry of low expectations” [i.e., their reflex contempt and hate of public schools] meets their “hard bigotry of mandated failure” [i.e., their misuse and abuse of standardized testing scores that feed VAManiacal schemes].
But talk about the gang that couldn’t shoot straight…
Even by their own metrics done under their own rules, they still find it hard at times to rig the game so they can sucker punch us.
Data-driven decision making [3DM]? What else can you expect from folks that consider this bit of Marxist math the highest form of 3DM—
“My favorite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.”
Groucho would be so very proud of his disciples.
😎
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Doesn’t this just tell you that it was set up so teachers would fail?
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The current use of metrics to evaluate teachers is arbitrary and flawed. This is great news for Pennsylvania since a sane governor is now leading the state. In many states the latitude granted to the governor in deciding the fate of teachers will result with many competent, well prepared teachers getting “vamboozled,” simply because they work with poor, classified or ELL students. What is even more absurd is that some teachers are getting their ratings based on students they don’t teach! It is unfortunate that some teachers can be “railroaded” by complicit governors that can play and tweak the formula to get the desired rate of dismissal and disruption that he chooses to inflict on students and teachers. This is corruption at its worst! Local measures are the best way to measure teachers’ performance. Local administrators understand the culture of the schools and the many factors influencing a student’s performance. Blind metrics are not the answer.
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“Local measures are the best way to measure teachers’ performance. Local administrators understand the culture of the schools and the many factors influencing a student’s performance. Blind metrics are not the answer.”
rt, Quite correct in “blind metrics are not the answer”. But then your using the edudeformers’ messaging that the teaching and learning processes can be “measured”. The teaching and learning processes are not rationo-logically measurable. We must learn to use the rationo-logically correct discourse/words/meaning. I believe that here the word “assess” would be better than measure. Measuring is a type of assessment that is not what can be done with a teacher’s performance. Attempting to “measure” teacher performance is a classic example of “blind metrics”.
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Don’t worry.
With fools and frauds like Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee and governors like Cuomo, Walker and Cristie in charge, they will just demand a different evaluation system until they can set a predetermined fail rate of 70%.
Then they will use that faulty, rigged evaluation system to fire 70% of the teachers and close all those public schools.
Meanwhile a handful of billionaire oligarchs led by Gates, Eli Broad, Gates, the Waltons, the Koch brothers and several hedge fund managers will be doing all they can spending hundreds of million and even billions of dollars to control the traditional media and subvert the Internet so they control the propaganda that keeps fooling a majority of the public to think (FAILING, FRAUDULENT) corporate Charters are saving America from all those lazy, incompetent, overpaid, public school teachers.
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All VAM formulas do is the give illusion of objectivity when in reality the governor has the power to manipulate the formula to create the desired predetermined outcome.
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Exactly.
VAM is only being used as a tool the achieve a goal that isn’t being publicized. One of the biggest goals is to get at that $600+ billion annual dollars from the 50 states that supports K-12 public education. The goal of the RheeFormers has nothing to do with improving the education of children. It’s about control. It’s about money. It’s about religion.
Spending a few hundreds million or a few billion to buy the propaganda space in the traditional media is a small price to pay for a windfall that would add up to trillions of dollars over the decades. All the RheeFormers have to do is keep spending on the propaganda campaign long enough to destroy the public schools and then that cost will diminish as they rake in the profits and the voice of the opposition is smashed into silence or at best a few murmurs.
If we add in the fact that the RheeFormers are also going after the public colleges, then we are looking at almost $1 trillion annually.
The RheeForm movement is the same as the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about right before he signed bills that created it.
But the RheeFormers are creating an eduction industrial complex that’s worth more than the annual defense budget.
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Since we know their plan already, we have the tools to defeat them.
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Pennsylvania is lucky to have a governor who supports public schools. Rare thing these days, bucking the dominant national narrative like that.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, our lawmakers and governor are spending yet another session on charter schools and vouchers, although 90% of the kids in this state of ALL income levels attend public schools.
The opt-out movement got their attention briefly, but once annual standardized testing was no longer at risk they went right back to the laser-like focus on charters and vouchers.
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So, it’s not the teachers, and not the children or their parents . . . Hmmm . . . , maybe it’s the politicians and “reformers” who have stolen resources and dictated test-centered, frenzied, non-child-centered curriculum and created competitive and fear-filled teaching/learning conditions, huge class sizes, dilapidated and under-staffed buildings . . . Hmmm, how about asking those teachers, children and parents, and stopping the ridiculous and counter-productive focus on testing and “evaluating.” Now where have we heard THOSE ideas before . .
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It’ll probably turn around with their new governor, though. He’s an unapologetic public school supporter.
“Agnostics” make lousy advocates for existing public schools, as we have learned.
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I laugh in the reformster faces as they look with dismay on their utter failure to demonize public school teachers as failures, despite just knowing that it must be true based solely on those worthless test scores. They have proven their idiocy over and over.
I also predicted that when this happened in FL that they would make the process harder and raise the bar. They did and we still overwhelmingly performed at effective and highly effective levels. They finally slowed it down a bit this year and reduced the VAM scores from 50% to 30% of our ratings since that didn’t work to destroy us.
I have no doubt they are working with ALEC to devise a more foolproof method of teacher destruction even now but they have all but destroyed their credibility with most of the public and parents, save those true believers that buy anything FOX news feeds them.
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As a PA teacher, I have gotten wonderful evaluations for the past 14 years. I am temporarily happy with my past two years in this new evaluation system – I scored distinguished, which results in a satisfactory rating (In the end, we are either satisfactory or unsatisfactory). I do worry that there is a planned bump in the road for us. And the endless nonsense, paperwork and forms steal time away from planning, grading, and creativity. It is also demoralizing to have to provide “evidence,” as if we are in court. These ideas, in addition to the horrific Keystone graduation exams, ever growing high stakes testing, and pretty much losing instruction in the month of April should be enough to wake up parents… but the public is still only starting to catch on. Fingers crossed that Governor Wolf can make the changes we need. Even in the affluent districts, we are feeling the poor practices of ed. reform.
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Parents should advocate to reduce the amount of testing. Their children of being robbed of valuable instructional time. When the stakes are high, the curriculum becomes narrowed. Students suffer due to the preoccupation with testing.
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Wow!
You still get to offer evidence. Under the new regulation in NYS, evidence is specifically excluded from consideration in evaluating teachers.
Believe it or not…
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Rockhound, I’m afraid that exclusion of evidence does happen in some of our situations already in PA, as some principals feel they have the authority to disregard what teachers “upload.” And they get away with it.
For some of us, the amount of time and energy it takes to collect and find ways of getting evidence into the system is so downright disgusting that we just don’t do it — especially as it becomes evident that administrators can ignore it anyway. The only place that time can come from is our teaching prep and all that goes with it, as our lives already are consumed by school needs (and our desire to do all that we can for our students).
This whole system abuses the resources that should be going to our children. We need to reach across state lines and fight this together, all of us. Thank goodness for Diane Ravitch’s blog and the other means we find to hear what’s happening to one another, and join forces to work to turn it around.
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All teachers have been accused of being untrustworty since the No Child Left Behind Act, where the naming of the law as well as the language and requirements in it legitimized the shaming of teachers, principals, schools…. You say: “It is also demoralizing to have to provide “evidence,” as if we are in court. ” That is part of the deal, being on trial year after year. Prove you are worthy of being employed and the evidence must please us or you are out.. In any case, congrats on getting through the hoops.
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We have known all along we have great teachers as well as some not so great but over all people who really care about kids, who work hard at their jobs etc.
My concern: For myself I do NOT believe in these evaluative “tests”.
As has been said many times. Who makes out the evaluative data, their expertise, their motivations in making out the tests etc.
Our public schools by and large produce great results. ]
BUT
corporate evaluative systems are more than suspect.
It is NOT ALWAYS good news when high scores are obtained.
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While I am happy for Danielle’s happiness, I warn us all against too much complacency. The battle is far from won — when we see it as a fight for our schools and our children and communities, and against those out to decimate public education. Teacher “evaluation” is but one part of the bigger battle, in which we have had some recent wins, but where there is still so far to go.
If you go to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette web page where this article is being discussed, you’ll see a bit of a reflection (somewhat skewed) of some of this battle. At the moment, the discussion is taking the form of bashing teacher unions for doing this and that to protect “bad teachers.” This will heat up in Pittsburgh and elsewhere as teachers’ union contracts expires (in Pittsburgh, that happens the end of this month) and the battle takes that form.
We should be grateful to the Chicago Teachers Union for showing us all how teachers can fight alongside, and not opposed to, their communities, when their (our) focus is on fighting for the schools our children deserve. Check out this article, and the beautiful photo, for an example, from our Chicago sisters and brothers in their current warm-up:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18047/ahead_of_contract_negotiations_chicago_teachers_declare_this_means_war
In response to the attacks on teachers unions, I just posted this in the Post-Gazette discussion:
“. . . As a current teacher and member of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, and as a 13-year coal miner and active member of the United Mine Workers of America (and the daughter of a Rosie the Riveter mom and steelworker/longshore dads, all active unionists).
“Teachers need unions today very much as industrial workers have needed them. In order to defend our students, their parents and communities, our schools, and, indeed, ourselves and one another against the same monied forces, and their government agents, who put their ability to manipulate us and make money way way ahead of (in this case) the right of all children to good public schools — just as they have put their money-making ahead of the rights of miners and steelworkers, etc., to safe jobs and decent pay.
“In fact, as I look around me and see my colleagues and our students abused by the destruction of our schools and the imposition of ridiculous “evaluation” systems, I think more and more often of how absolutely critical my union was when my buddies and I strove to keep one another from being hurt, or killed, in the coal mines. Teachers need our unions to pull us together, along with our students and their parents and communities, just as much as did our industrial-working sisters and brothers. We need this not to “protect bad teachers,” but to protect public education and our communities against those who have done so much to set us so far back.”
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Totally agree – I am not happy. Just temporarily relieved and waiting for the other shoe to drop… Parents (And I am the mother of 3 public school students) need to speak up and opt out. It is the only voice we have. Also, as a teacher, parent, and friend, I refuse to use the term “bad teacher.” I tell kids and their parents that most teachers are not “bad,” some are just a better match for you than others. I am sure the teachers who I recall as “bad,” may have just been a bad match for me. I truly believe that most are well-intended, even if they are not a perfect match for my kids. If we use reformer terminology, we promote their warped PR and agenda.
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Kippdawson
When I read posts, such as yours, I think to myself, “I wish there was a like button on Diane’s blog.”
But then again… not having a ‘like button’ means that I have to take a bit of time to respond with a few words of my own.
I appreciate your thoughtful contribution to the conversation.
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“When over 99 percent of the teachers in the public school systems of Pennsylvania are listed as satisfactory, I know that something’s wrong. You know that something’s wrong.”
What’s wrong is making jihad on teachers who are quite capable professionals in order to defund public school systems for privatizers.
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Ahh, but the ratings don’t actually matter if your a teacher. The Republican-controlled legislature is moving ahead with two bills. The first would do away with tenure and base furloughs on the new rating system. It doesn’t matter if you’re satisfactory or not. Low scores (even satisfactory ones) are on the chopping block. There is also a bill in play that would allow teachers to be dismissed simply for “financial reasons.” Currently, they have to do away with an entire program or have a reduction in student enrollments to furlough teachers. What it adds up to is an effort to furlough tenured experienced (and more expensive) teachers and replace them with cheaper new teachers. Also, there is an incentive in the VAM component of principals’ evaluations to low ball teacher evaluations. Most of the gains that keep teachers satisfactory are actually attributable to the student outcomes portion of our evaluations (ironically, because this is what was supposed to hold us down).
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